My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

“Sheriff,” she says, repaying the jumpscare he gave her last night.

  “What you doing here?” he asks.

  “Community service?” Jade asks right back.

  “She’s stuffing envelopes, sir,” Meg says, looking up over her glasses to show Hardy that he’s making a nuisance of himself in the front office, when his job is obviously not the front office.

  “I see, okay, okay,” he says, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand, his six-hours-old five o’clock shadow raspy and loud against the stiff cuff of his shirt.

  “Is everything…?” Meg asks, completing the sentence with her eyes.

  “Staties are here,” Hardy says with a shrug, like he didn’t want the dead-Founder case anyway. To show how all right he is with it, he hangs his brown coat on the unstolen coatrack, puts his flat-brimmed official hat on top of that, and then swings his belt off, crashes it down on a lateral filing cabinet hard enough that Jade expects the service revolver to fire into her gut.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Hardy says to Meg. “Gonna be a long night.”

  “And miss all the excitement?” Meg says back with a grin.

  “Don’t know what I’d do without you,” Hardy tells her, and, passing by her desk, works something stubby and black up from his shirt pocket, deposits it in a wire-screen pencil holder on Meg’s desk, tapping the lip of the pencil holder twice.

  “If anybody calls—” Hardy starts, “Route them through Dispatch,” Meg finishes. “And then tell you who they are, of course.”

  “My Girl Friday,” Hardy says, sweeping past.

  Jade has no idea what kind of pornographic pet name that might be, and doesn’t think she wants to know.

  Hardy stops at the hall, loosening the brown tie she’s only now realizing he’s got on.

  “You were supposed to start tomorrow,” he tells her, his voice booming through the station.

  “Early bird gets the maggot,” Jade says, flashing an evil smile.

  “Eat what you will, eat what you will…” Hardy says in farewell, fading down the hall, still working on his tie.

  “Very proper for a young lady,” Meg tells Jade without having to look over to say it.

  “I’m a woman, hear me roar,” Jade says back, and licks the next envelope with as much attitude as she can pack into it, imagining her tongue lacerated by a thousand cuts, her teeth coating in blood.

  An hour later Jade’s on stack seven of infinity, and every time she looks up, her vision is stained pale green. The corner in the wall over by the copy machine is actually a giant fold in-process, and Jade, inside that white envelope, has checkboxes for eyes. The stool she’s stuck on has a sticky surface some greater tongue has already licked. Meg is a greasy black hair that’s fallen into the works to mess everything up, one Jade can’t quite pinch up or flick away.

  She raises her hand and Meg calls on her.

  “Yes?”

  “Bathroom?”

  “Complete sentence, please?”

  “May I visit the single stall women’s restroom whose toilet I know better than I want to already?” Jade says with full-on defeat. “The one I’ve been scrubbing already for the past—”

  Meg chaperones her down the hall.

  “Receptionista and ladies’ room attendant,” Jade says. “This is a full-service station, isn’t it?”

  “Feel free to wiggle out the window in there,” Meg says. “It’s rusted open.”

  “The night is an embryo…” Jade says, leaning in. Washing her hands, she catches a flash of herself in the mirror. “Nightmare Girl to the rescue,” she says, “up up and—”

  Meg escorts her back to her station that feels like a cell, in the town that’s definitely a prison.

  This is such a great plan for glomming onto information about whatever happened in Terra Nova, yes. But, on the sulky way past Meg’s desk, Jade does at least clock that wire-screen pencil holder that Hardy deposited something into: TRANSCRIPTIONS.

  Well well well.

  “There anything else I can do instead?” Jade whines to Meg.

  “When you’re done with the referendums you can apply postage, yes,” Meg says, her eyes holding on to Jade’s, maybe to see her flinch.

  “More licking, yay,” Jade says, and takes her stool.

  For the next two stacks she imagines going fast enough that she sweats, fast enough that she can rub the tacky backside of the eventual stamps into her swampy armpits before applying them to the envelopes.

  Get your entertainment where you can find it, right?

  For now Jade has to make do with the grey smudges her stained fingers are still leaving on the pristine white envelopes, which she guesses will make the people of Proofrock aware these are hand-stuffed, not machine-.

  Like that matters. Like any of this does.

  This time when Jade lowers her forehead to the desktop for just a moment’s escape, she forgets that she’s awake, so that when she comes to, she’s all alone in the front office, like she’s been sucked into some Freddyfied version of where she just was.

  She looks to the doorway for a bleating lamb, to the other doorway for a bodybag sliding away, and then to the water cooler, to see if it’s just water in there.

  It is. For now.

  Jade taps her right foot on the ground, testing it.

  Not oatmeal. Same old floor.

  Maybe this isn’t a dream. Meaning… meaning Meg didn’t wake her this time? Jade dials her hearing up, can just make out Hardy in lecture mode in his office, Meg’s attentive burble filling in the empty spaces, and some quiet stretches between the two of them that’s probably some official on speakerphone.

  When Jade tries to glide over to the Important Pencil Holder on Meg’s desk, she finds, moments too late, that her legs are asleep, so it’s more of a stumbling lurch, one that dislodges an inbox of metal-case clipboards, sends them sailing over the edge.

  Jade dive-falls, just keeps them from rattling to the floor.

  She sets them gently back in their place, checks the hall again because Meg can appear at any moment, and then she’s in Meg’s chair, is fumbling for the digital recorder Hardy dropped in the pencil holder.

  It smells like his breath, plugs into Meg’s computer like it knows that socket, confirming for Jade whatever “Girl Friday” means. And now, of course—of course—Hardy’s voice in his office is doing that rising thing that denotes the end of whatever session this is for him and Meg and the caller.

  “Shit shit shit,” Jade whispers, and jabs a tab open in Meg’s browser, dials her school email up and logs in, jacking the password up not just once but two times, the warning flashing that one more failed attempt and she’ll be locked out until tomorrow.

  Making herself go slow, she enters the letters of “Haddonfield” backwards, replacing the vowels with symbols and numbers.

  Her inbox pops on-screen.

  She drags the only file off the digital recorder into a new message right as the door closes down the hall, Meg’s shoes approaching at a painfully brisk clip. But the file isn’t loaded yet, is too big, shit shit shit.

  Jade sends it anyway, which at least minimizes that guilty window, and, making herself wait long enough that the file might have had long enough to get sent, she guides the digital recorder out of its socket—X’ing out the DEVICE REMOVED WITHOUT EJECTING error pop-up—sliding it over, over, over…

  She can’t lift her hand to get it over the metal lip of the wire-screen pencil holder, the TRANSCRIPTIONS to-do box. Not without announcing what she’s just been doing.

  Is this it, then? Is this where she gets busted, hauled into the place she already is, her mask ripped off?

  Not if it doesn’t have to be.

  Not before she hears that recording, anyway.

  Because she can’t give herself away by raising the hand she has turtled over the recorder, she leaves it there beside the pencil holder and slumps forward as if exhausted, trying hard to sell that this is just where her hand got to unintentionall
y, ma’am, sir. Meg.

  “And what are we doing here?” Meg asks, suddenly just there.

  Jade fake-flinches, “roused” from a cat-nap on the clock.

  What her mouse hand has opened just on reflex is the last email from Mr. Holmes. It’s still the top message in her inbox. And now that it’s open, it could have just been new.

  “Just,” Jade gulps, calling on her inner Billy, her inner Stu, finally saying, “Mr. Holmes.” She leans back, holds her hand out, presenting the email for Meg to see. “My dad doesn’t believe in internet,” she adds, cringing from having to play a card this needy.

  Meg just scans the email. It’s about certain liberties she took with the bibliography of her last make-up paper, the biggest of those liberties being that there wasn’t a bibliography.

  “I’m…” Jade starts, starts again, fully aware she’s the only one speaking here: “Ask Sheriff Hardy. It’s a late paper he wanted me to still submit.”

  “The sheriff?”

  “Mr. Holmes. For history class.”

  “Which you already graduated from.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “That part I do believe,” Meg says, scooching in but not yet displacing Jade, a proximity Jade overplays her reaction to, jerking her left arm—and hand—such that that wire-screen pencil holder goes tumbling off the edge of the desk, the digital recorder swan-diving in right after it.

  “Shit, shit, sorry,” Jade says, standing so that Meg’s rolling chair rattles back against a file cabinet.

  “This is why we should all stay at our own stations,” Meg tsk-tsks, collecting the scattered objects as if they’re nothing. She holds up the recorder, though, says, “If this doesn’t work…”

  Jade nods, playing guilty. For just and only that, nothing else.

  “Go on then,” Meg says about the still-open email on her screen. “I don’t want to stand in the way of academic progress. Reply. I’m sure teachers in the summer live for messages from students. Especially retired teachers.”

  Jade positions her fingers at the keyboard version of ten and two, makes her email as short as she can: Just finished it this morning, will send it tomorrow by noon. doc or pdf?

  She sends it with a flourish, like tapping the final ivory key of a piano performance, and in getting that fancy, she manages to accidentally open the file already attached higher in that thread. For a bad moment she’s sure Hardy’s mumbled voice is going to come through Meg’s speakers, but then the computer’s two-bytes are just rubbing together in their digital way to open the word processor around this document.

  “He wants hard copy too?” Meg asks, probably because, being Tiff’s mom, she knows Mr. Holmes prefers paper over digital. Probably so he can stand outside and smoke while grading.

  “Do you mind?” Jade asks.

  Meg motions for Jade to continue being the burden she already is, so Jade hits print, and—shit shit shit, that’s right. This is one of her lists, could be either giallos in order of descending title length or “Actors Whose First Role Was in a Slasher”!

  Neither are her best side, she’s pretty sure.

  The printer spools up high, higher, and then starts spitting out not a single page, which would be the stack of giallos, but the three- or four-pager, with Tom Hanks and George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston and Daphne Zuniga probably so prominent that no way can Meg not say something about them.

  Meg, reading a memo, wanders over, plucks the stack-so-far up, and gives it a cursory scan.

  “Johnny Depp?” she says to Jade.

  “Nightmare on My Street,” Jade mumbles, sucking her top lip in.

  Meg breathes in deep, blows it out slow, and walks the pages over to Jade, says, “Using office supplies costs fifteen minutes on your time card.”

  “Thank you,” Jade says, and logs out of the computer much more carefully, spins around in her chair like a real long-time county employee, her coveralls magically in her lap already.

  “And he is cute, I’ll give him that,” Meg calls after her.

  Jade looks back, He? evidently painted on her face.

  “Johnny Depp,” Meg says, complete with playful eyebrows. “I used to have a poster of him on my wall.”

  “Brad Pitt was in Cutting Class,” Jade throws out there.

  Meg considers this, finally seems to decide she’s not sure they’re each in the same conversation, so ends it with, “It’s between you and him of course. Mr. Holmes, I mean.”

  “And the school district,” Jade adds, rolling her list of slasher debuts into a tube and popping it on the end, which is Meg’s cue to usher her the rest of the way out of the front office, apparently.

  “Has it been twelve hours already?” Jade play-asks, electing to push the door open before her rather than have her face smushed into it.

  “Just wait,” Meg says, sweeping the problem Jade is from her office. “When you’re my age, you’d pay anything to have these hours back.”

  Jade chocks her coveralls under her arm with the roll of pages, and, maybe fifteen steps from the building, all her attention pouring into her phone, waiting for this sound file to load from her email, she hears the single worst possible sound to hear: a lamb, bleating from the darkness to her immediate right.

  Jade gasps and gulps in the same instant somehow, which sends her coughing, ends with her bent over, hands on her knees so she can dry-heave.

  The bleat comes again, maybe a touch slower this time, as if aware of the response it’s provoking.

  Her eyes adjusting to the night now, Jade can just make out a shape stepping forward out of the gathered shadows, and, because she is who she is and knows what she knows, she’d bet her last breath—which she just coughed up, pretty much—that that shadowy figure’s about to go bandy-legged, its arms stretching out farther and farther from its sides, until the knives-for-fingers on the right hand can scratch into a wall, a tree, her throat, it doesn’t matter.

  “Whoah, whoah,” this Freddy says, though.

  Bit by bit, Jade assembles this voice into one she’s known since kindergarten.

  “Banner?” she says. Banner Tompkins?

  He steps forward, flipping the hourglass in his hand, which… isn’t an hourglass at all. It’s a deer-call, one of those little cans with some air-driven mechanism inside that bleats out a deer call when you turn it over.

  And—and Banner, he’s got a rifle slung over his shoulder, warpaint under his eyes, hunting pants tucked into his boots.

  “Jade,” he says back, and then they both look up when the world goes halogen-white: two pickups screeching in, the lead truck hiking a front tire up onto the grass. The beds of both trucks are lined with more hunters.

  “What?” Jade says, just in general.

  “Bye now,” Banner says, and touches the brim of his straw cowboy hat, vaults up into the bed of the lead truck, which is already peeling out.

  “Who?” Jade says then, because her first question was so effective.

  She steps out of the way for the trucks to barrel past, and the grim faces of all these high school graduates and their dads sitting across from each other in the beds, the butts of their rifles riding their knees, long barrels tilting into the sky—they’re soldiers, aren’t they? This is some kind of war.

  Against what? The deer?

  The last face Jade sees is Lee Scanlon’s. He’s looking back, his free hand clamped tight on the tailgate, his lips pressed together, his eyes for all the world pleading with her, as if he’s being abducted, just needs someone to say something about it.

  Jade tracks the taillights until they make a turn just short of the highway, to the right. Where there’s only logging roads that all bottleneck at the Old Bridge, two miles down the creek. The bridge that only leads to…

  Caribou-Targhee National Forest, on the other side of the lake.

  “Jaws,” Jade says at last, like making a late identification of those two trucks. This is that comic relief scene in Jaws, where all the boats are vying for
space in the water so can they be the ones to haul the killer shark back to Amity Island.

  It’s not so funny in real life, though. That look in Lee Scanlon’s eyes for the half-second Jade saw him, it was fear, one hundred percent. Not that there’s any sharks up here in the mountains. And not like any motley crew of villagers ever actually kills the slasher—looking at you, Halloween 4.

  Jade remembers that massacred herd of elk over in Sheep’s Head Meadow on the other side of the lake, though. And elk are way tougher than people are.

  For a moment she considers ducking back into the sheriff’s office to have Meg pass word on to Hardy that strange things are afoot at this particular Circle K. Things that could get people hurt.

  But, too, a slasher’s gonna do what it’s gonna do, right? You can’t stop wheels this big and timeless from turning, from grinding over who they need to grind over. All you can do is keep your eye on the sky, for if one of those wheels is rolling at you.

  Jade thumbs her earbuds in right then left, wobbles her head to make sure the cable’s free enough, and Hardy’s already droning through them at a steady mumble.

  “—the one who looked like a young George Peppard, that one? Or’s he too old for you, Megan?”

  Jade sneaks a look behind her to be sure she’s alone. With Hardy whispering right in her ear, she doesn’t feel very alone. She does most definitely clock Hardy’s use of past tense, though. Whoever he talked about looked, not “looks.” Ding ding ding, give the man a headstone, he’s dead.

  No clue on “George Peppard,” though she likes the way Hardy rides that last syllable. It makes her want to say it herself, except of course he’s not waiting for her, is just droning on. Fast-fast, she pauses his dictation, image-searches “George Peppard,” and, holy shit, Hardy was right: that is one of the Founders, right down to the rakish smile, the hair, the softness at the edges that means money.

  Deacon Samuels.

  To be sure-sure, Jade searches him up as well, tabs back and forth from Peppard, and, yep, it’s like she did the same search twice.

  Point for Hardy.

  “Thank you, sir,” she says to him, and unpauses his voice.

  “He didn’t exactly have permission, no, strike that, strike that, delete. I mean, I’d given him a warning already, that better? Yeah, looked like someone was shooting a Roman candle over there, just poof, poof, poof, these orange fizzing balls arcing up from the old camp, sizzling down into the lake.”